


Where the Extremes Meet

by WaterandWin



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-03
Updated: 2011-08-03
Packaged: 2017-10-22 04:38:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/233832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaterandWin/pseuds/WaterandWin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A long time ago, it used to be that the lowest possible on land had a lot in common with the highest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For Homesmut:
> 
>  _So according to Mindfang's journal, the highbloods live centuries-- and the lowbloods don't._
> 
>  _The Sufferer's revolt was before her time, or at least in the past-- and the Grand Highblood is definitely in his prime by the time everything goes down with Dualscar. But so, his childhood could have been anywhere from ten to twenty to a few hundred sweeps back._
> 
>  _Give me some fic of the Grand Highblood and the Sufferer growing up together and slowly coming to terms with their respective positions-- and lifespans-- in the world? Any quadran, pale, flushed, or black, I just need need some Ancestor-flavored MoTheRfUcKiNg BeSt fRiEnDs all up in this meme... the more heartbreaking, the better._

Before he was the Sufferer, bane of the highbloods and leader of the greatest rebellion in Alternian history, he was just Portan Mesias, three sweeps old and clutching a rusty sickle for dear life and on the verge of tears because he heard a noise in the bushes. The bushes rustled again and he swallowed. 

“I know you’re there!” he squeaked, readjusting his grip. “Show yourself!” 

For the longest time, or maybe it was just a second or two, nothing moved. Then the bush rustled again and a little muddy hand poked out from under the leaves. Portan screamed. Someone else screamed, too and the hand vanished. By the time Portan swung as the bush with his sickle, it was totally empty. 

By the next day, it was evident that the stranger’s presence hadn’t vanished. Several hives near the edge of the forest had their trash cans knocked over and rummaged through. The way this particular cluster of redblood lawnrings spread, each new handful of wrigglers had to clear a section of forest to build their hives in. Thus the oldest redbloods lived farthest away from the woods, which in the long run proved to be better for the young ones who would be culled on sight if they got into the older trolls’ way. Living so closely was not very efficient, but only greenbloods and above could afford the luxury of living alone without others of their kind. Red and yellowbloods stuck together not for protection so much, but for the cases when an angry highblood came around to hunt for sport; the more targets there were, the more could get away when the attacker’s attention was elsewhere.

While the strange disturbances continued, no one but Portan had managed to catch a glimpse of the illusive creature. His neighbors were already fantasizing about what it could be, mostly trying to outdo each other in who can come up with the most dangerous creature and then daring someone to go and cull it. Only one of two among them had ever actually killed anything and they were probably lying about it. Everyone was both thrilled at the idea and terrified to venture into the dark forest alone. After several nights of excited chatter, a party of a dozen or so decided to go take a look together. Portan argued his way into the leadership position on the basis that he had seen the thing’s enormous terrifying claws before and therefore had the most experience. Armed with makeshift spears and weapons scavenged from corpses, faces painted with wriggler blood, the small platoon of children crept into the forest just as the darkest part of the night swept over them.

Once inside, it became evident that traveling as a group like this was noisy and inefficient, so Portan ordered everyone to split up and to call for help if they ran into trouble, knowing full well that most of the party would run  _away_  from whoever was in need. Nonetheless, the young trolls set off in different directions and after several minutes were far enough apart that Portan couldn’t make out the sound of footsteps any longer, just the eerie cries of creatures he’d rather not run into. He continued like this for what felt like an hour, bending back branches and occasionally swiping his sickle threateningly at a particularly scary shadow. When his stomach began to growl loudly enough that he thought the monster might hear, he stopped, looked around, and wished his stupid scaredy-crab of a lusus were here with him before crouching down where he stood since it was a good a place as any and pulling out the sandwich he made for lunch.

Just as he was about to take a bite, the bush to his left rustled. Portan froze, sandwich hanging limply as inch from his mouth and eyes twice as big as they should be, fixed on the offending shrubbery. He wanted to scream for help but neither his voice nor his throat would obey him. After a second of tense silence, the bush moved again and this time a head popped out. Its face was so muddy it was hard at first to recognize it as belonging to a troll, but from the mud-plastered dark curls poked two orange horns that twisted toward the canopy. He looked about the same age as Portan and equally as terrified, his yellow eyes darting from the fellow troll to the sandwich and back again. He moved forward again on all fours, but his arms and clothes were too muddy to be able to make out even the color of his symbol, much less what it could be. 

The second movement seemed to snap Portan out of whatever trance fear had trapped him into and he scrambled back, a feat made difficult with food in one hand and a sickle in the other. 

“Don’t come any closer!” he snapped. 

The troll ignored him, crawling ever so slowly all the way out of the bush.

“I’m warning you!” Portan quivered. 

The troll grew closer still. 

“Not one more step!!” 

The troll stopped not two feet from Portan, eyes the sandwich, and then with nothing but a flicker, snatched it up and crammed half of it in his mouth at once, scarcely chewing before taking another bite. 

“Hey! What the fuck!” Portan yelped. “That was mine!” 

The muddy troll flinched away, curling around the sandwich like it was precious and sliding back. 

“Oh no you fucking don’t!” Portan lunged at troll grabbing him by the ankle. “Give it back!”

“No!” the other managed with his mouth full.

“Give it!”

“No!”

The two rolled in the dirt, the stranger always holding the sandwich just out of reach until at last Portan managed to latch onto his sleeve, at which point he just flat out dropped it. 

“Hey!” Portan growled. “Now I can’t eat that!” 

Seeing an opening, the other troll wiggled out from under Portan and tackled the sandwich, brushing off the sand and shoving it into his mouth. The redblood made a face at him and got to his feet. When the other looked up at him, he had his sickle raised. 

He had to kill him. That was the proper thing to do. It was what trolls did: kill other trolls. And this was probably the guy that everyone was looking for anyway, so he was going to die one way or another. Portan might as well get the glory for it, if he could keep his hands from shaking so much. The troll in front of his was just pathetic; no way he could fight back, kneeling there all muddy and skinny and scared. It would only take one swipe. Just one.

“What’s your name?” the troll asked.

“Huh?” Portan responded, clearly a master of conversation.

“Your name,” the sandwich-stealer responded. “Mine’s Markor. What’s yours?”

“Uhh...” The sickle was getting heavy, so he lowered it. “Portan.”

Markor said nothing. He just sat there. Portan felt like he had to say something.

“So... were you the one that knocked over all those waste receptacles?” 

A nod.

“Why?”

“I was hungry.”

Portan stared at him. “That’s gross. Can’t your lusus feed you?”

“I don’t know where he is,” Markor mumbled, rubbing his eye. “I hope he got away from the subjuggulators. I tried to wait for him but they were after me mostly so I couldn’t wait for very long--”

“There was subjuggulators after you!?” Portan shrieked. “Why? How?” 

Subjuggulators didn’t go after just anybody, mostly trolls that threatened the hemospectral order. It was their job to keep down rebellions, but there notoriously corrupt sometimes, too and killed whoever was dumb enough to wander into their court if they felt like it. 

“I- I don’t know,” Markor continued. “They showed up and nicked my arm and I guess they decided they didn’t like my blood, but I bit the guy that was holding me and hid, so they burned down my hive and, and...” The longer he talked the faster he spoke until he just trailed off and rubbed his eyes furiously. At last he sobbed, “I don’t wanna get culled!” 

How low on the did a guy have to be for the subjuggulators to want to get him dead? Portan looked at his own hands, pulling back the sleeve to see the strings of red running through is wrist. He had been certain he was the lowest of the low. What could possibly be lower? Well, maybe the answer sat in front of him. 

“I- I guess I won’t cull you then,” he signed. “But it’s not because I forgive you or anything!” 

“If it’s not you it’ll be someone motherfucking else,” Markor whined.

It was a good point. How was it fair that highbloods could just go and burn someone’s hive down for having the wrong blood color. No one could help that! It was just plain mean to pick on someone for their blood, and no way no how would Portan follow suit!

“No it won’t,” the redblood pouted. “No one is gonna hurt you ‘cause you’re coming with me!” 

Markor blinked up at him. “Really?”

Portan gave him a firm nod and offered a hand. “Get up.” 

The other troll examined the hand before crackling a lopsided grin and accepting. “You got it, motherfucker.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Portan - Irish for "crab"  
> Mesias - "messiah" in several languages  
> Markor - contraction of Markhor, which look like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Capra_falconeri_hepteneri.jpg


	2. Chapter 2

As luck would have it, Markor was the only one of the two boys that remembered how to get back out of the forest. The rest of the troop that went in was not so lucky to have a guide. Besides Portan and Markor, only three others made it out before sunrise. 

Hiding in shadows from the rising sun, the boys snuck to Portan’s hive unnoticed. There Portan immediately set to filling the ablution trap while snapping at his guest not to touch  _anything_  or he would “fucking snap your wrist off, you grimy piece of shit.” Even so Markor managed to track his mud everywhere, but Portan couldn’t exactly claim to be innocent himself since he wasn’t the pinnacle of cleanliness himself after trekking through the woods half the night. 

After a brief tussle with his lusus over bringing a stranger into the hive, Portan forced Markor to hand over his disgusting clothes so he could wash them. Part of it was so they would be dry sooner, but the majority was simple burning curiosity over how low the hemospecrum really went. Little did Portan know that it would only be after his death that the subjuggulators would order the extermination of someone below a rusty rouge, or for that matter, a lot of someones. All of them, to be exact. As he stared at the symbol being revealed to him through muddy water, he realized that troll currently in his ablution chamber was not being hunted because he was too low, but because he was too high. It was not uncommon for older trolls to kill young ones of similar but higher blood than themselves to preserve their own position of power.

The highest troll Portan had ever seen in person was yellow that was just bordering on green. What existed beyond that he could only guess, but from the stories he’d heard a young troll would think they were all hulking monsters that never died. And yet, Markor didn’t seem like any of those things. He seemed like a kid, frankly, just the same as Portan was. On the other hand,  _shit shit shit he had something higher than a subjuggulator in his ablution chamber!_

He had to do something. Should he kill him? Maybe he could drown him if he were quick about it. No, that would take too long and he might change his mind in the middle, which would leave him with one pissed off indigo blood. But he couldn’t just leave him there! Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh man oh god what did one do in this situation? Cutting his throat would be fast but what if the blood stained and someone found it? He’d be culled on the spot. Or worse! Oh he should have just killed in him in the woods! 

“Hey best friend!”

Oh fuck oh fuck  _he brought friends._  It was now or never, before however many of them there were realized Portan was onto them. He clutched his sickle in one hand and after some thought took up a pot lid in the other. The pot itself he fit over his head, for once thankful his horns were so little. In time they would grow and in time he would file them down himself right down to the skin as a symbol of his rejection of the social order. 

“Hey! Hey, best friend, where are you?”

Portan took a deep breath and kicked the door. Much to his surprise the window remained firmly shut and the highblood didn’t look as if he’s moved from the tub.

“Who were you talking to?” Portan asked, checking behind the door.

“I was all up and getting my shout on for you, bro. You and your sweet motherfucking hat gotta come over here and check this shit out.”

Portan cocked an eyebrow. Markor was holding up his hand with thumb and index finger pressed together to make a circle between them, but there was nothing spectacular. Readjusting his superior war helmet, Portan crept closer until he was practically right next to the tub. Between the soapy fingers stretched a thin iridescent membrane.

“Motherfucking miracles, right?” Markor grinned. “How does the soap know how to up and motherfucking do that? Who taught it that shit, am I right?”

Portan puffed at the membrane and it slipped out of existence. “There’s something seriously fucking wrong with you,” he told him. 

Markor frowned at his fingers until his face split in a smile and he held up one soapy hand. “That’s only one way of looking at it, brother. Everyone I ever got my talk on with’s been a little different, and maybe being motherfucking different from all the other motherfuckers’s what makes up all the same, you know?” 

With his other hand he found Portan’s wrist. The redblood struggled, but only succeeded in knocking the pot on his head over his eyes, unleashing a string up curses. When pushed it back to his hairline, Markor had his palm pressed to his. 

“I mean look at this shit. Everyone’s always all up and saying that these here motherfuckers are better than those motherfuckers down there and so on, but look. We’re the damn motherfucking same.” 

And so they were. Same sized hands. Same grey skin. Only by looking very, very close could Portan tell that his own hand was warmer in color. The biggest difference by far was temperature, but it was common knowledge that the higher the blood, the longer the life, the slower the heart, the cooler the body. Other than that, identical. Only after staring for a few seconds did Portan have the sense to pull his hand away.

“That’s fucking stupid. I don’t even want to count how many times you contradicted yourself,” he . huffed. “Hurry up and finish already.”

The troll in the tub gave him a soapy salute as Portan marched out of the room, wiping his hands on his front as he went. To his dying day, he would never fully decide if sparing the other’s life was a mistake.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

After feeding him and dressing him in one of his sets of clothes, Portan sat on top of his recuperacoon and watched in fascination as Markor shuffled around and picked up every last discarded shirt and sock littering the respitblock and added it to the growing pile in the middle of the floor. In a few sweeps he would wonder if it was instinct or this particular experience that lead him to do the same day after day, camping in the outlands with his followers without a drop of sopor slime for miles. In the end he would decide it was probably some sort of nesting instinct.

On this day though the effort of pile-building went to waste, because halfway through the day a weight dropped with a squelch on top of Portan. He groaned and tried to slap the disturbance off. 

“Go away.”

The disturbance sniffled. “I had a bad dream.”

Portan cracked an eye open. He couldn’t be sure if it was the the light from translucent nature of the purple recuperacoon on the other trolls face or if those were tears. 

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“Can I stay in here?” 

“Where the fuck do you expect me to go?”

“You can stay here too." 

At this Portan forced his eyes fully opened and sat up. Trolls rarely shared anything, and recuperacoons were very high on that list. They were hard shells for a reason, and that reason was to block out the outside world when one was at their most vulnerable and relaxed. Letting in someone else was just a death wish. 

“Fuck off.”

“But- but-”

“Get out!” 

Markor wibbled his lower lip before sinking into the slime up to his nose. “I don’t wanna.” 

It was the first sign of a stubborn streak that would one day start a war.

One day, but not today. Sopor slime did after all have calming properties, and the indigoblood was lucky for it. All Portan did was snarl and bare his teeth before his eyelids grew too heavy for him to start arguments. They woke that evening, as they would in all the evenings to come for many sweeps yet, on opposite sides of the pod with a tangle of legs in the middle.

The concept of sharing a hive is entirely foreign in troll culture. In very rare instances, a particularly vital moirallegance might take up idea, but Portan and Markor were no moirallegance. Portan wasn’t even sure what to call what they had. Some days it certainly seemed like they could be moirals. Portan was knew things about Markor not even Markor knew about himself, and there were times when Markor would blurt something out that made Portan realize that Markor knew more about him than he was comfortable with. Over the sweeps they certainly learned all the ins and outs of each other.

That wasn’t to say that all those ins and outs were used to keep the other calm, however. When they fought, boy did they fight. One would think they were really trying to kill each other when they went at it, and sometimes they were. Other times it was just a test of strength or speed or who would do the dishes. They had the seeds of a grand kismesissitude, and they would for their whole lives. History would argue if they ever went through with it, if the whole revolt was just the greatest caliginous waltz ever commenced, but no evidence exists that it was ever made official. Even so, it would be centuries after the Sufferer’s fall before the Grand Highblood took a new black lover, a new leader of a new lowblood revolt. 

If Portan had to place himself and Markor into a quadrant, a problem that had started to bother him immensely since about the time he’d turned six, that quadrant slowly became apparent when the two were nearly seven. While it’s true that highbloods live longer, all trolls commence their transformation to adulthood at about the same time but at varying paces. In the span of a few perigees Portan had managed to nearly outgrow Markor, and took the latter substantially longer to begin to show interest in any quadrant-filling at all. Even so, Portan was somewhat disappointed to discover each day in the mirror that his horns were not yet longer than his hivemate’s, and probably never would be. 

The biggest change in the highblood, and the one that became apparent first, was the voices. Portan traces them back to the night they spent on his roof, on their backs with arms spread wide and heads together, just watching the stars. It was then that Markor asked the question.

“What do they say to you?”

“What, the stars?”

“Nah, motherfucker. There’s like a million of those little brothers all up and getting their twinkle on up there. I only hear two.”

Portan turned his head to look at his friend and after a moment responded, “I don’t hear jack shit.”

“Huh,” was all Markor replied. It was unusual for him, and thinking back Portan should have taken more notice. Even if he had, he reassures himself, there was nothing he could have done.

The voices, he came to learn, Markor nicknamed Shouty and Whispers. Neither were particularly very nice. At first Markor was scared of them and when they got too noisy he could cower with his hands over his ears for hours at a time. Portan once caught him trying to shut them up with sopor slime and proceeded to sock him across the face for it, causing him to spew a mouthful of slime on the rug. After that, things only got worse.

Gradually Markor began to mumble things; terrifying, disgusting things that made Portan’s blood boil. The boys got into more fights than ever about some of the things he said, or rather what the voices said through him. It was then, when they were nearly seven, that Portan decided he would auspisticize between Markor and his voices. It was hard, especially as the voices got more violent, but when Markor started to go into fits of destructive impulses, Portan was the only hope anyone had of calming him down.

That is, of course, until the day he tripped. Had Markor gotten to him that day, history would have been irrevocably different. As it so happened, his lusus jumped in the way first. With a splatter of mutant crab blood, their fates were set. Markor ran, and Portan didn’t know why and didn’t care. If he weren’t worried for his own life now that his secret was exposed, he could have chased after him and killed him in the most painful way he could imagine. Instead, he packed as many things as he could and vanished. It would be the last time he laid eyes on his friend Markor.

Where he went after that no one is really sure. When a troll turns nine sweeps, the drones come. The troll fills their first pail, chooses their adult name, and is sent off to the imperial forces with their adult title. The drones never found Portan, and so he never received a name. All the better for it; he was outside the system now. For sweeps there is no record of him, but of the troll once known as Markor there is plenty.

He appeared out of nowhere at the subjuggulator’s court and challenged the Grand Highblood to a duel. The old troll found this wriggler hilarious and accepted, only to have his head wrenched from his shoulders before he even had time to be surprised. On that day, the youngest Grand Highblood in all of history assumed his post before his horns were even fully grown.

As for the Sufferer, whispers of a disturbance started in Alternia’s largest hivestem cluster. There were always whispers of rebellion in places of such high lowblood population, and the military thought nothing of it. What they didn’t realize was that the city was merely the recruiting point; the real camps were out in the desert. Before anyone knew what had happened, an army to rival the empire’s own was amassed, and at their front marched a troll bound in red. He bore no symbol and no horns. He had traveled to every corner of Alternia in his lifetime and back again. He’d seen every injustice, and they all stemmed from the system. He knew even the highest and lowest could get along when color didn’t matter. The system was at fault for teaching some were better than others, and when the system is at fault, it must be brought down. 

In the end, he failed. In the end, the rivers ran red and orange and yellow. In the end the he was the one, filthy and tired and aged beyond his sweeps, who was forced to kneel on the blood-caked floor of the Highblood’s throne room. It hurt to breath and it hurt to think, but he still had the sense to look up when two indigo boots stepped into his field of vision. The troll before him looked barely older than Markor had been when he had last looked him in the eye, but if Markor was still hidden under all that paint, he’d been dead for sweeps.

“What’s your name, motherfucker?” Whispers asked.

The Sufferer spat at him.

“Good answer,” Shouty replied as he raised his club.


End file.
